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most like sugar water. If you've ever sprinkled salt on grapefruit or cantaloupe and marveled at how the fruit seemed to become sweeter, you've tasted this phenomenon in action. Sugar can draw out hidden flavors Sugar stimulates our receptors in an interesting way, bringing out flavors that we otherwise wouldn't perceive. Researchers at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated this by asking volunteers to chew sweetened mint-flavored gum until the flavor was gone. Although the volunteers couldn't taste any mint, the researchers found mint gas was still present in their subjects' nasal cavities. Given sugar, the volunteers said the mint flavor returned. For cooks, the point is simply this: A bit of sweetness can bring out other flavors in food. Just a pinch of sugar in a savory dish can make a big flavor difference. For example, I add a bit of sugar to my salad dressings. Sour ingredients can correct imbalances Acids can balance out flavors that have veered too far in a certain direction. You can some- times rectify a dish that tastes too salty by adding a mild acid like lemon juice or vinegar. These types of sour ingredients can also tame a dish that's too spicy. Acidic ingredients have a mar- velous ability to brighten fooda spritz of lemon or lime often seems to make a dish's flavor come to life. All sour substances have a single hydrogen atom proton that directly triggers our sour receptors. This hydrogen atom is small and reacts rapidly with many ingredients, giving acids their great power to quickly add zing to our food. Umami ingredients build on one another Just as sugar and salt stimulate certain taste receptors, many foods that contain small protein pieces (such as nucleotides and salts of glutamic acid) stimulate our umami receptors. Umami is hard to describe; it's sometimes referred to as "tastiness" or "savoriness" or "mouth satisfaction." Umami stimulators are abundant in wine, eggs, spinach, ripe tomatoes, mushrooms, soy sauce, and aged cheeses, especially Parmesan, to name just a few. One very interesting property of umami-tasting compounds is their magnifying effect on one another. Studies have shown that combining two umami compounds produces eight times more flavor than you would get with a single umami compound tasted alone. Put into a culinary context, this means that cooking with, say, either mushrooms or Parmesan will give a dish some umami "tastiness," but if you use mushrooms and Parmesan together, you'll have enormously more "tastiness" than you would get with either ingredient alone. OppOSite tastes attract Here's one more tip for making food taste great: don't let your taste receptors get bored. food scientist Harold McGee has noted, repeated exposure to the same taste causes the receptors to gradually lessen their response to the taste. Variation and contrast are key to keeping our taste receptors stimulated. Playing sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami tastes off one anotherwhether you're serving sweet apples with aged cheese or a sweet-sour sauce for meatmakes physiological sense. As Shirley O. Corriher, a food scientist and a contributing editor to Fine Cooking, is the author of Cook Wise . • the Taste buds contain clusters of 50 to 100 taste receptor cells that represent all five tastes. Umami AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2002 29